The following letter to Skeptic magazine is a response to an
article by L. Kirk Hagen published in 2005 (Skeptic, Vol. 11, #4). The parts of my
letter in brackets [ ] were omitted by the Skeptic
editors—but these parts were not crucial to the thrust of the
letter. For those who would like to read Hagen’s article, the
full text is included following my letter. Using red brackets [ ] and font, I have embedded within
Hagen’s text my commentary and
“corrections.”

Letter to the
Editor of SkepticPublished in
Volume 12, #2, 2006, page 17

In his dismissal of
Derrida (“The Death of Philosophy,” Skeptic,
Vol. 11, #4, 2005) L. Kirk Hagen demonstrates a thorough and ironic
misunderstanding of deconstruction—thorough in the sense that
it
could hardly be more wrong and ironic in the sense that as a scientist
Hagen is especially well-equipped to understand deconstruction. Hagen
claims that deconstruction is the antithesis of the scientific attitude
and the tradition of Enlightenment rationality and its spirit of
inquiry (sometimes referred to as “modernism”).
Nothing
could be further from the truth.

In an article in The
Quarterly Journal of Speech (Vol. 85, #4, 1999, available at
this site; click herefor
link), I argue that the difference between modernism and
postmodernism (particularly deconstruction) is one of degree and that
postmodernism is a logical and thorough extension of the modern
breakthrough insight, prominent in Newton’s work, consisting
of a
new approach to understanding oppositional relation. Stephen Hawking
points out that Newton’s laws of motion imply, contrary to
Aristotle, that there can be no point of absolute rest (an
implication Newton himself could not accept) thereby altering the
discrete
oppositional division between motion and rest. Einstein’s
work
brilliantly confirms and extends this understanding of motion and leads
to a similar alteration of the discrete oppositions between space and
time, wave and particle, and matter and energy.

Derrida’s
views of language constitute an analogous alteration of
oppositional relations, oppositions implicit in the modernism of
structuralism, that led to new ways of seeing the tension between
signifier and signified, text and context, sameness and difference (in
relation to meaning). Derrida’s work also leads to the
formulation of laws of language, one of which he refers to as
“the law of iterability,” (see Derrida, Glyph
2: Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 1977, 234; for a full
account of these laws see Cult of the Kill,
Chapter Five). These laws serve in relation to language much as
Newton’s and Einstein’s laws serve in relation to
the world
of macro and micro physics. They enable predictions and they are
capable of falsification by one contrary piece of empirical evidence.
But, so far, no one has been able to offer any contrary evidence in
relation to Derrida’s laws of language, and, as a
consequence,
his view of language stands as the most viable and the most complete to
date in terms of accounting for all the empirical evidence offered in
the various modes of interpretation, communication, and
miscommunication language presents through endless textual examples.

[Similar to
Hagen’s case, it is even more surprising that a
trained physicist such as Alan Sokal should also fail to see the
similarity in the approach to oppositional relations evident between
contemporary physics and postmodern language theory in the form of
deconstruction. In fact, after presenting the evidence, I claim in the QJS
essay that Derrida’s method and views are “as much
in
keeping with the tenor of scientific tradition since the Enlightenment
as anything that can be imagined” and that “Derrida
is in
this sense more a keeper of the scientific tradition than
Sokal.”
Furthermore, “given the understanding of opposites implicit
in
his arguments, Sokal belongs more to the Aristotelian
tradition.”
The same can be said of Hagen.]

[Both] Hagen [and Sokal]
appear[s] to be almost hysterically
overwrought about the assault on objectivity and “the real
world” believed to be presented in the challenges of
deconstruction. If so, this hysteria is groundless and represents an
appalling misunderstanding. [In one of numerous attempts to set the
record straight on such misunderstandings Derrida had this to say:
“… the emergence of the value of
objectivity…belongs to a context. We can call
‘context’ the entire
‘real-history-of-the-world,’ if you like, in which
this
value of objectivity and, even more broadly, that of truth (etc.) have
taken on meaning and impose themselves. That does not in the slightest
discredit them. In the name of what, of which other
‘truth,’ moreover, would it?” To accuse
Derrida of
more extreme versions of relativism such as implicit in the
“anything goes” form of interpretive license and
notions
such as “physical reality is at bottom a linguistic
construct” is to be grossly unfair and inaccurate. In light
of
Derrida’s efforts to put such confusions to rest, the kind of
blindness Hagen and Sokal show toward deconstruction, despite their
academic qualifications and scientific training, is difficult to
understand.]

Derrida does not
discredit “truth” nor abandon
“objectivity.” He
does not do so any more than does Einstein—the author of the
theories of special and general relativity. Why is it so easy for
scientists to accept a form of relativity in the realm of physics but
remain stubbornly opposed to any analogous relevance of a form of
relativity in the realm of semiotics?

Gregory Desilet
Longmont, Colorado

THE
DEATH OF PHILOSOPHY

Jacques
Derrida 1930-2004

L.
Kirk Hagen

When Philosopher
Jacques Derrida died in Paris at the age of 74 last year, French
President Chirac said “France has given the world one of its
greatest contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of
intellectual life of our time.” On this side of the Atlantic,
Time
magazine called Derrida “an intellectual demigod”
whose
influence on Western thought had been
“immeasurable.”
Similarly lofty eulogies appeared around the world, all paying homage
to Derrida’s best-known invention, a concept called
“deconstruction” that became popular in the 1970s,
part of
the Holy Trinity of postmodern philosophy, alongside Marxism and
psychoanalysis. Postmodernism is notorious for its brash assertion that
all accounts of the world--scientific, historical, folkloric, you name
it--can never be objectively true because they are all just examples of
discourse, or “competing vocabularies,” as the
arch-postmodernist Stanley Fish one said.1 To
this day, the
“postmodern turn” retains near-monopoly status in
some
segments of academia. “It lies like an incubus over the
entire
humanities curriculum,” is how philosopher Raymond Tallis put
it.2 Derrida had even been rumored to be a
candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.

For those who declined a
ride on the deconstruction bandwagon,
Derrida’s legacy is rather different from what President
Chirac
would have us believe. Traditional scholars in the humanities have felt
all along that deconstruction was to philosophy what professional
wrestling was to athletics. Its devotees spent a quarter of a century
beating their chest and boasting that their radical epistemology would
make short work of received ideas in philosophy, literary criticism,
and even the natural sciences. English professor Frank Lentricchia had
boldly announced a paradigm shift as early as 1980, when he spoke of
Derrida’s work as “the end of an era” and
a time for
“summing up, listing debits and credits, for a casting out
the
old and welcoming the new.”3
The very name post-modern was intended to denote an epoch that would
right all the misconceptions of the modern era for which Descartes,
Bacon, Galileo and their ilk were responsible. In the end, however, the
traditionalists were vindicated. The postmodern revolution degenerated
into one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of the
humanities; an episode from which it will not soon recover, and for
which Derrida must bear a large share of responsibility.

[The
end of deconstruction has been trumpeted by many
“traditionalists” in academe since the late 1980s.
See for
example Peter Shaw’s prediction in The Chronicle of
Higher Education,
Vol. 27, #13, November 28, 1990. Nevertheless, the popularity of
Derrida and deconstruction continued to increase to the point that
in
2002 a feature-length documentary on his life and work, filmed by Kirby
Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, achieved commercial success in the United
States as well as internationally. And one of Derrida’s last
public speaking appearances—in Campbell Hall at the
University of
California at Santa Barbara (late October, 2003)—produced
attendance exceeding the seating capacity of the hall (900). The
continuing stream of books on Derrida—over 150 titles since
2000
versus about 25 for John Searle and about 40 for Richard
Rorty—indicates no abatement in the popularity of
deconstruction
in relation to “traditionalists” and other
competing
popular trends.]

Speech Degree
Zero

Derrida’s
fortunes started to go south in early 1990 when a
600-word column on deconstruction titled “Construction
Site--It
May Not Mean What It Was Meant to Mean, and It May Not Mean Anything at
All” appeared in the Sunday edition of the Los
Angeles Times.4
The author, columnist Jack Smith, normally wrote about less airy topics
like bird watching and high school football. His contribution to the
debate over things Derridean was little more than a sharp elbow to the
ribs of a pretentious academic movement whose love of obfuscation
seemed to know no bounds. Smith’s brie critique of
deconstruction
is not memorable for what it said so much as for the incandescently
vitriolic responses it incited. “Childish, irresponsible, and
ideologically dangerous,” fumed one of Smith’s
readers.
“Anti-intellectual rot,” wrote another. One reader
ranted
about an “attack on deconstruction by a man who glories in
his
own purposeful ignorance.” Another went so far as to compare
the
column to the “assaults on the intelligentsia made by Stalin
in
the 20s, or Hitler in the 30s.”

Nearly everyone
who defended deconstruction invoked intellectual privilege of some
sort. It was said that Derrida’s work was too difficult for
people like Smith because “it relies on an in-depth knowledge
of
Western philosophy from Parmenides to Husserl, a set of theoretical
gambits that are at odds with those implicit in this same Western
culture, a use of language that is intentionally metaphoric, and no
desire to lower his rhetorical or discursive
‘level’ to
please an audience which has not done its
‘homework.’” Deconstruction, an angry Los
Angeles Times
reader insisted, was the literary equivalent of Godel’s
Incompleteness Theorem. Without a thorough background in Marx, Hegel,
Freud, and Heidegger, it was said, trying to come to grips with
deconstruction would be as futile as trying to understand nuclear
physics.

To appreciate why
Derrida’s supporters went ballistic over such a trifling
column,
one has to go back half a millennium, to the birth of modernism.
Philosophy has steadily lost turf since then, as many of the lines of
inquiry once firmly in its grasp have been taken over by other
disciplines. In the 17th century, Galileo irrevocably moved cosmology
out of Aristotelean metaphysics and into the arena of scientific
inquiry. In the 19th century, Darwin moved human origins--and therefore
human nature--from the Book of Genesis to the theory of evolution. By
the 1960s, there was widespread concern in the humanities that the hard
sciences were moving towards epistemological hegemony. In 1971, Edward
G. Ballard even raised the possibility that philosophy had completed
its service to humanity: “Has philosophy only a few last
remaining tasks of analysis and clarification to perform before its
career is ended and the sciences and technology take over the whole
responsibility for formulating and solving human problems?”5
He compared science to Zeus; an opportunist who emasculated his old
parent philosophy and seized control of the kingdom of knowledge.

Especially painful was
the transformation that came about in the study
of language, the subject Derrida cherished above all others. Noam
Chomsky had moved all of linguistics into the adversary’s
camp in
the late 1950s. Daniel Dennett’s reminiscences vividly
capture
the reaction this provoked: “Many of those who hated
(theoretical
linguistics) condemned it as dreadful, philistine scientism, a clanking
assault by technocratic vandals on the beautiful, unanalyzable,
unformalizable subtleties of language.” The anti-Chomsky
hostility was most conspicuous in the language departments of American
universities, Dennett notes. These were the very places where
deconstruction would later become sacred.
“Chomsky’s work
was science,” recalls Dennett, “and science was the
Enemy--as every card-carrying humanist knows.”6

And then, a savior. The
Algerian-born Derrida matriculated at the Ecole
Normale Superieure in Paris in the post-war 1950s and began studying
Husserlian phenomenology. A decade later he was contributing to the
left-wing journal Tel Quel. Derrida’s
work there led to the 1967 publication of Grammatology,
his magnum opus. The objective in Grammatology
was the establishment of a “science of writing”
which,
Derrida boasted, “shows signs of liberation all over the
world,
as a result of decisive efforts.”7
Derrida was about
to assemble an army of humanist rebels to engage the evil philistine
scientism. They would attack the core of Western metaphysics--its
“logocentrism.” A text is not an oracle devoid of
preconception, the argument went. Rather, any text (and
“there is
nothing outside of text,” Derrida famously proclaimed) is a
sort
of multidimensional mosaic of ideologies, presuppositions and biases
that a reader approaches from an equally biased perspective. The reader
and text are like two galaxies passing through one another, each one
affected by the force of the other. Any objective correspondence
between text and reality is thus necessarily subverted. Such are the
forces that the science of writing studies.

[Again,
as indicated in the above letter, why is it so hard for Hagen to
imagine an interweaving context of influences may be as important
in textual studies as it is in the study of astronomical bodies under
the theory of general relativity? Does this form of
“relativity” destroy all sense of
“objectivity”? Einstein did not think so while
nevertheless understanding his view altered the simple
objectivity of Aristotelian cosmology.]

And how does one become
a scientist of writing? Presumably by mastering the methods spelled out
in Grammatology,
though it is not a good idea to set expectations too high. Much of
Derrida’s masterpiece is devoted to an analysis of
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s 18th century Essay on the Origins of
Language.8
There could hardly be a worse piece of classical literature to use as a
springboard for a revolution in our understanding of thought and
language. Although Rousseau showed the undeniable signs of genius
throughout his life--his “Profession de Foi du Vicaire
Savoyard” is among the most sublime defenses of religious
tolerance ever set to paper--his essay on the origins of language is
little more than a compendium of 18th century European prejudices. It
includes nothing any contemporary linguist would call insightful.

[Derrida acknowledges his attention to Rousseau’s essay
my
appear “exorbitant” and provides a thorough
explanation for
this attention and a justification for his “method”
in
approaching the study of language. Apparently Hagen did not bother to
read this passage (pp. 157-164).]

In his discussion of the
formation of “languages of the north,” for
instance,
Rousseau wrote that “as long as an Asian has women and rest,
he
is content,” while people from Northern climes, where the
soil is
raw and the labor demanding, “are easily
irritated,” which
predisposes them to “strong articulations which make them
harsh
and noisy.”9

Few people in the 20th
century ever read this strange essay, and fewer
still wrote about it. What is surprising, as John Ellis pointed out in
one of the earliest and strongest critiques of Derrida’s work
is
that Derrida actually appeared to take some of Rousseau’s
ruminations seriously.10 Ellis won’t
say for sure that he does, however, because it is usually unclear in Grammatology
when Derrida is serious, when he is speaking metaphorically, and when
he is simply word-smithing with no real objective in mind.

[At least part of the
“objective” Derrida had in mind in Of
Grammatology
was to show the difficulty in clearly separating these modes of
speaking from what is often referred to as
“literal” modes
of speaking.]

This great seminal work in deconstruction
thus
points to one of the most dumbfounding ironies of the postmodern age.
One would think that the literati, whose job it was to understand,
explain, and even teach the art of good writing, would have themselves
excelled at self-expression.

Yet Derrida, the most
revered figure in 20th century literary
criticism, was unforgivably reckless in his exposition. He composed
weird, almost surreal narratives that seemed intentionally
unintelligible. He took familiar words and concepts hither and yon, and
distorted them beyond recognition. In spite of all that,
Derrida’s disciples continued to read his analysis of
Rousseau,
judging it to be one of history’s most profound works on
language. They were often shocked to learn that Derrida was never taken
seriously as a linguist outside of literary circles. In 1992, a group
of philosophers including W.V.O. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus formally
protested Derrida’s candidacy for an honorary doctorate at
Cambridge, saying “many French philosophers see in Mr.
Derrida
only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed
significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French
philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.”
Berkeley
philosopher of language John Searle complained about
Derrida’s
“distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously
false,” and Chomsky curtly dismissed Derrida’s work
as
“gibberish.”

[Derrida
was eventually granted the honorary doctorate by an overwhelming
(nearly two-thirds) majority vote by the Cambridge faculty. As
Christopher Norris points out (www.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/issues/one/norris_text.html),
the “embarrassment” now lies clearly on the side of
those
who signed the letter of protest, all of whom obviously did not have
even a basic understanding of Derrida’s work—not
because
his work is over their heads but because they could not be bothered to
give his texts sufficient attention to achieve an adequate reading.]

There is good reason
for such disrespect. Like the essay it analyzes, Derrida’s Grammatology
is without merit. Among Derrida’s most fervent supporters, it
is
difficult to find any two individuals who can agree on what the book is
supposed to be about. How could they? On page 7 Derrida explains that
“the word ‘writing’ has ceased to
designate the
signifier of the signifier,” and adds that “strange
as it
may seem, the ‘signifier of the signifier’ no
longer
defines accidental doubling and fallen secondarity.” In other
words, the ‘signifier of the signifier’ conceals
and erases
itself in its own production.”

[Here Derrida
is using the word “writing” as a signifier to
indicate the
text of “what is written”—itself a set of
signifiers. Seen in this way, “writing” is the
“signifier of the
signifier” (where “what is written” also
functions as
the “signified”). In this passage Derrida is
suggesting the word “writing” is “beginning to
go beyond
the extension of language” and must be understood to describe
“the movement of language.” Derrida then explains
what he
means by this “movement”: “There the
signified always
already functions as a signifier. The secondarity that it seemed
possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all signifieds in general,
affects them always already, the moment they enter the game. There is
not a single signified that escapes, even if recaptured, the play of
signifying references that constitute language.” In
Derrida’s account the word “writing” has
become
problematic, now signifying something more than the “simple
supplement to the spoken word.” This
“movement” or
“play” suggests to Derrida the need for a
reformulation of
the oppositional tension between signifier and signified, and the
ability—indeed, the unavoidable necessity in
language—for
the one to become the other.”]

On page 165,
Derrida
asserts that writing is like masturbation because both are dangerous in
that they “transgress a prohibition and are experienced
within
culpability.”

[Out of
context, this
association seems bizarre. But when placed in context it begins to make
sense. Derrida discusses onanism as a form of auto-affection and then
has this to say about auto-affection: “Within the general
structure of auto-affection… the operation of
touching-touched
receives the other within the narrow gulf that separates doing from
suffering…. Auto-affection is a universal structure of
experience. All living things are capable of auto-affection. And only a
being capable of symbolizing, that is to say of auto-affecting, may let
itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the
condition of an experience in general. This
possibility—another
name for ‘life’—is a general structure
articulated by
the history of life, and leading to complex and hierarchical
operations.” The structure of reflexivity in auto-affection
is
also a precondition for consciousness which is also a necessary (but
not sufficient) precondition for language].

He then
tells us
that language has “lost life and warmth” because
“its
accentuated features have been gnawed by consonants,” and
that
consonants are easier to write than vowels.11

[Here Hagen engages in shameful misrepresentation. This is not Derrida
speaking but rather Derrida rephrasing and explaining Rousseau in a
passage previously cited from which the phrase “lost life and
warmth” is taken.]

Elsewhere in Grammatology
he makes up terms like “consonantic chilling” and
“speech-degree zero” that mean nothing to
linguists.
Analyzing Rousseau’s comments on languages and climates,
Derrida
concludes that “although the difference between south and
north,
passion and need, explains the origins of languages, it persists in the
constituted languages, and at the extreme, the north amounts to the
south of the south, which puts the south to the north of the
north.”12

[Again, citing these
passages without sufficient context does Derrida a great disservice. It
is clear from the context that Derrida is using the terms
“consonantic chilling” and “speech degree
zero”
(no hyphen) to help explain what he believes Rousseau is saying in the
following passage: “It would be easy to construct a language
consisting solely of consonants, which could be written clearly but not
spoken. Algebra has something of such a language…. In those
(languages) burdened with useless consonants, writing seems to have
preceded speech; and who would doubt that such is the case with
Polish?” Derrida’s comments explain Rousseau as
suggesting
that a language consisting only of consonants would be, metaphorically
speaking, “frozen” in writing, a
“dead”
language, incapable of being spoken, incapable of being liberated in
speech—thus “degree zero,” a point of
freezing, the
point of “consonantic chilling” in phonological
gridlock
(see page 303 in Derrida’s text).]

The whole book
goes on in pretty much the same vein. Along the way, Derrida
demonstrates almost complete ignorance of developments in linguistic
theory that took place after about 1900. The overarching problem, then,
is not that Derrida’s assertions are untestable, or that they
are
testable but observationally false. The problem is not even that
Derrida’s claims are implausible. Rather, the problem is that
Grammatology simply doesn’t
mean anything. That’s a rather serious shortcoming in a work
dedicated to understanding language.

[Here
a fair reader will more likely conclude that Hagen’s
discovery
that the text “simply doesn’t mean
anything” says
more about his rather than Derrida’s
“shortcomings.”]

The closest
Derrida ever came to an intelligible hypothesis was his claim that
writing is “prior” to speech. Now surely, you may
be
thinking, Derrida doesn’t mean that humans literally
wrote before they spoke. Evidence to the contrary is so overwhelming
that it is difficult to imagine anyone making such a statement and
actually believing it.13 But if
Derrida’s claim was
not supposed to be taken literally, what other sense can be assigned to
phrases like the one on page 14 of Grammatology
(“there
is no linguistic sign before writing”) or the one on page 238
(“writing had to appear even before there was a question of
speech and its passional origin.”14)?
Derrida
qualified his thesis by saying that “writing precedes and
follows
speech, and comprehends it,” which is about as helpful as
saying
that language originated before, during and after the Upper Paleolithic
Period.15

[Hagen conveniently ignores the fact Derrida takes great pains to
make clear in Of Grammatology
that he is using the word “writing” in an extended
sense, a
sense he explains from the outset (from page 7 forward), the sense
of “writing before the letter,” the sense of
“writing” as it implies a structure and a logic of
oppositional tension between signifier and signified to which every use
of language, including what is commonly referred to as
“speech,” conforms. Derrida shows the sense in
which
“speech” conforms to certain structural limitations
(between signifier and signified) that previously had been thought to
belong only to or primarily to “writing.” In this
regard,
the phoneme is no different in its structural limitations than the
grapheme and it is in this sense both the phoneme and the grapheme
are kinds of “writing.” In this broad understanding
of
“writing,” limitations and structures identified by
Rousseau and thought to belong primarily or exclusively to writing are
seen to apply to language and to the sign in general. From the
perspective of Derrida’s critique of Rousseau,
“writing,” as a word for the possibility (and
possibilities) of sign systems, may be seen to be “prior to
speech.” Along this line of reasoning
“speech”
becomes a species of “writing.”]

John Caputo, one
of Derrida’s most ardent supporters, once chastised the
“careless critics” for using this literal
interpretation
against Derrida. But while Caputo had no problem explaining what
Derrida did not mean, he too found it
excruciatingly difficult to explain what Derrida did
mean. In typical postmodern style, Caputo defended Derrida by stumbling
from one opaque metaphor to another. “Derrida does not mean
that,
historically, writing is older than speech,” insisted Caputo.
“Différence is
archi-writing,” he explained, and “you cannot ask
what différence is, or for its meaning
or truth.”

[Here
Hagen cites the passage incorrectly, apparently unaware that Caputo is
explaining Derrida’s neologistic term “différance”
not “différence.”
This lapse in accuracy of citation and inattention to detail regarding
the special significance of this term in Derrida’s work is an
extraordinary lapse for someone who touts adherence to
“empirical” and “scientific”
rigor and only
confirms Hagen’s superficial examination of deconstruction.]

It is “the quasi-condition of possibility.” It is
“a
Buddhist finger at the moon of uncontainable effects.”16
Caputo pummels his readers with big words for two more pages, and then
wisely moves on to a different topic.

The Science
Wars

Derrida never
made any effort to improve his prose. And yet, over the years hordes of
converts took to aping his impenetrable rodomontades in article after
article, dissertation after dissertation, book after book. A stellar
example was Alan Sokal’s 1996 paper “Transgressing
the
Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity,” which appeared in a special edition of the
postmodern
journal Social Text that was devoted to the
postmodern
“Science Wars.” It was in that article that Sokal
first
revealed to the world how Derrida’s observation about the
“Einsteinian constant” relates to “the
invariance of
the Einstein field equation under nonlinear space-time
diffeomorphisms.” Sokal was a bona fide physicist, and his
paper
a ringing endorsement of the postmodern program and its key tenet that
“physical reality is at bottom a linguistic
construct.”17 Here was the scientific
cachet that the postmodernists felt they needed and deserved.

The only drawback
was that it was a hoax. Sokal would soon admit that his paper was
really just “a melange of truths, half-truths,
quarter-truths,
falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that
have no meaning whatsoever.” He wrote it, he said, not just
for
laughs (the traditionalists were rolling on the floor) but to expose
the declining standards of intellectual rigor in the humanities. The
knee-jerk defense from deconstructionists had always been that Derrida
was misunderstood because his ideas were so deep that only the literati
could get their minds around them. The fact that a thoroughly
meaningless article could be published in a prestigious postmodern
journal proved that Derrida’s aficionados did not themselves
understand their ideas.18

[Social Text
was not a journal Derrida endorsed and its editors were never
embraced by Derrida as his “aficionados” or as
representative interpreters or exponents of his ideas. In fact, Derrida
was very concerned about most American interpretations of and
commentaries on his work.]

If this were pro
wrasslin’,
then “Transgressing the Boundaries” would be the
old
Tombstone Piledriver; a move that leaves even the most belligerent
combatant punch-drunk.

On May 18, 1996, the
Sokal Hoax made the front page of the New York Times.
Derrida himself had not been singled out in Sokal’s article,
nor in the devastating sequel Fashionable Nonsense,
which Sokal co-authored with Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont.

[Derrida was not singled out for good reason. Neither Sokal nor
Bricmont could find a single passage where Derrida had made a flawed or
ill-informed reference to or use of science.]

But Derrida
was a
proud man who felt he had been dissed, so he wrote a response for the
French daily Le Monde. His letter, titled “Sokal and Bricmont
are
not serious,” is one of the few writing samples from Derrida
that
is actually comprehensible. Derrida tried to score points through
condescension, referring to “le pauvre Sokal.”19
But he did not have anything with which to dispute Sokal. He simply
defended his reputation by insisting “I am always economical
and
prudent in the use of scientific reference.”

[Derrida says much more than this in Le
Monde.
He acknowledges that although he had not been the direct target of
Sokal and Bricmont’s book he was, at the beginning of the
hoax,
among the “preferred targets” then removed from the
direct
list only to become an oblique target through many newspaper and
magazine articles promoting the book and the hoax. As an oblique
target, he was attacked for his supposed
“relativism” and
“anti-Enlightenment” stance against
“reason.”
In Le Monde he responded by saying:
“These people (Sokal
and Bricmont) are not serious. As for the
‘relativism’
which, it is said, would worry them, well, where this word has a
rigorous philosophical meaning, there is no trace of it in my work.
Neither of a critique of Reason and the Enlightenment. On the
contrary” (Le Monde, November 20, 1997, p.
17).]

Alas, Derrida was no
scientist. Time and time again in Grammatology
he refers to the “science of linguistics,” the
“modern science of language,” the
“science of
writing,” the “idea of science,” the
“roots of
scientificity,” the “science of the possibility of
science,” the “scientificity of science,”
the
“science of science,” and so on ad nauseum,
even
though there is nothing in his book that is recognizably scientific.
There are no experimental protocols, no empirically testable hypotheses
or predictions, no account of language acquisition, no theory of mind
or brain, no insights on universal grammar, no archaeological or
anthropological data, or anything that even resembles science.

[The
article I refer the reader to in my letter above, available on this web
site, thoroughly refutes the claim that Derrida “was no
scientist.” With his view of the structure of oppositional
tensions Derrida belongs more in the mainstream of scientific thinking
since the Enlightenment than Sokal or Hagen.]

Reconstruction

Although we are nearly a
decade into the post-Sokal death throes of
postmodernism, it remains difficult to gauge Derrida’s
legacy. He
wrote a slew of books on a slew of subjects during the 1980s and 1990s,
none of which succeeded in rendering his core ideas transparent, or
even translucent. He shocked quite a few people when, in a debate on
international politics, he refused to call the 9/11 atrocities an act
of international terrorism.20

[Here Hagen gives his source as Julian Coman’s obituary on
Derrida in The Telegraph.
Coman cites Derrida as saying, “an act of
‘international
terrorism’ is anything but a rigorous concept that would help
us
grasp the singularity of what we are trying to discuss.”
Coman
does not provide the source for this remark but it would appear to come
from Giovanna Borradori’s interview of Derrida in Philosophy
in a Time of Terror
(2003). However, I can find no passage that corresponds precisely to
this statement. Again, through second-hand sourcing and narrow context
Hagen badly distorts what Derrida is saying.

In
this interview Derrida does not refuse to call the events of 9/11 acts
of “international terrorism” but instead questions
the
extent to which that label sheds adequate light on the complexity of
these events. As Derrida points out, the expression has not been one clearly understood or agreed upon in the international
community. Commenting on a televised session of the UN following the
events of 9/11, Derrida
explains, “For just as they were preparing to condemn
‘international terrorism,’ certain states expressed
reservations about the clarity of the concept and the criteria used to
identify it. As with so many other crucial juridical notions, what
remains obscure, dogmatic, or precritical does not prevent the powers
that be, the so-called legitimate powers, from making use of these
notions when it seems opportune…. Semantic instability,
irreducible trouble spots on the borders between concepts, indecision
on the very concept of the border: all this must not only be analyzed
as a speculative disorder, a conceptual chaos or zone of passing
turbulence in public or political language. We must also recognize here
strategies and relations of force…. Let’s look
again at
many of the phenomena that some are trying to identify and interpret as
(national or international) ‘terrorist’ acts, acts
of war,
or peacekeeping interventions. They no longer aim at conquering or
liberating a territory and at founding a nation-state. No one any
longer aspires to this, not the United States or the (wealthy)
so-called ‘northern’ states, which no longer
exercise their
hegemony through the colonial or imperial model of occupying a
territory, and not the countries formerly subject to this colonialism
or imperialism. The ‘terrorist/freedom fighter’
opposition
also belongs to the categories of the past. Even when there is
‘state terrorism’ it is no longer a question of
occupying a
territory but of securing some technoeconomic power or political
control that has but a minimal need for territory” (2003,
103-105).

While
desiring to step back from oversimplifications and crudely polarized
thinking regarding “terror” and
“terrorism”
that followed the events of 9/11, Derrida nevertheless makes very clear
he must not be confused in any way with those who would defend the
perpetrators or the strategies of 9/11:

“What
appears to me unacceptable in the ‘strategy’ (in
terms of
weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so on) of the
‘bin Laden effect’ is not only the cruelty, the
disregard
for human life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is
worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious
fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such
discourse open onto no future and, in my view, have no future.
If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility of public space and of
the world juridical-political scene, of the ‘world’
itself,
then there is, it seems to me, nothing good to be
hoped for
from that quarter. What is being proposed, at least implicitly, is that
all capitalist and modern technoscientific forces be put in the service
of an interpretation, itself dogmatic, of the Islamic revelation of the
One. Nothing of what has been so laboriously secularized in the forms
of the ‘political,’ of
‘democracy,’ of
‘international law,’ and even in the nontheological
form of
sovereignty… none of this seems to have any place whatsoever
in
the discourse ‘bin Laden.’ That is why, in this
unleashing
of violence without name, if I had to take one of the two sides and
choose in a binary situation, well, I would. Despite my very strong
reservations about the American, indeed European, political posture,
about the ‘international antiterrorist’ coalition,
despite
all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy,
international law, and the very international institutions that the
states of this ‘coalition’ themselves founded and
supported
up to a certain point, I would take the side of the camp that, in
principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility
in the name of the ‘political,’ democracy,
international
law, international institutions, and so on. Even if the ‘in
the
name of’ is still merely an assertion and a purely verbal
commitment. Even in this most cynical mode, such an assertion still
lets resonate within it an invincible promise. I don’t hear
any
such promise coming from ‘bin Laden,’ at least not
one for this world” (2003, 113-114)].

Even then his followers
did not fold up their tents. Finally, in April 2003, the New
York Times,
covering a critical theory symposium at the University of Chicago,
declared that “the era of big theory is over,” and
the
grand paradigms that swept through humanities departments in the 20th
century--psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction,
post-colonialism--have lost favor or been abandoned.”21

Musing on
Ballard’s image of philosophy as a dying patient, one
cannot help but recall the death of 17th century scientist Pierre
Gassendi, who was subjected to nine purgative bleedings to remedy a
fever. When his condition worsened, Gassendi begged for mercy. But a
zealous physician ordered five more, and Gassendi finally died. At the
end of the 20th century philosophy lay gravely ill, its lifeblood
having been sucked out by other disciplines. Derrida and others like
him tried to save the patient by purging it of logic, reason, and clear
exposition. It was the worst treatment imaginable at such a critical
juncture in philosophy’s history.

And yet the
forecast for the humanities is not all gloomy. In the pre-Derridean
years, the humanities were a celebration of all forms of human
intellectual enterprise; of science, literature, art, and music. Will
and Ariel Durant’s encyclopedic Story of
Civilization,
for instance, is a lucid, engaging, and thoughtful treatise on our
intellectual and cultural history. And contrary to rhetoric from the
far left, traditional works like the Durants’ were not all
Western-hegemonic in their outlook. The Durants portray Western
Civilization warts and all, with forthright accounts of our shameful
slave-trading past and our sad history of religious bigotry. The
Durants also wrote extensive chapters on Islamic and Asian influences
on our cultural development. Traditional scholarship is now making a
comeback, “growing up in the cracks of the postmodern
concrete,” as one critic has said, even as other writers
explore
new areas in which the sciences, or at least the scientific outlook,
can inform research in the humanities.22 Steven
Pinker,
Joseph Carroll, and E. O. Wilson are among those on the vanguard of a
movement that is, as Pinker writes, “consilient with the
sciences
and respectful of the minds and senses of human beings.”23

As yet this new school
has no name (though “Reconstruction”
has an undeniable appeal). Whatever it is eventually called, it will be
none too kind to Derrida. That is a real shame, because while Derrida
was no great shakes as a writer or philosopher, his work makes it clear
that he was exceptionally well-read and well-educated in the Western
tradition. His intellect certainly could have been put to better use.
Sadly, having one’s name associated with the latest, greatest
idea has always been irresistible to academics; the grander the claim,
the grander the fame. Thus it often happens that talented scholars will
manage to bedazzle a decent number of like-minded enthusiasts and sail
off into murky waters. Changing course entails the loss of prestige,
and bad ideas end up lingering way too long.

Deconstruction
lingers on, as is evident from the accolades published after
Derrida’s death. But it is time to start looking for a
suitable
epitaph, and the best candidate so far comes from the oft-cited
“Letter to a Japanese Friend” that Derrida wrote to
Professor Izutsu in 1983.24 “What
deconstruction is
not?” asks Derrida. “Everything of course! What is
deconstruction? Nothing of course!” Derrida was right...of
course.

[To which, in conclusion, a
fair reader can
only add in bemused recoil from Hagen’s obtuse commentary:
“…of course!” Derrida was never one to
abjure
provocative playfulness but, for those who care to read with an open
mind, the answer to the enigma of “What is
deconstruction?”
is available in Derrida’s work in language any admirer of
Enlightenment rationality can, with a little effort, readily decode.]

References1.
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No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing
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Tallis, R. 1999. “Review of Impostures
Intellectuelles.” P.N. Review, no. 128, June3.
Lentricchia, F. 1980. After the New Criticism.
Chicago, University of Chicago Press.4.
Op. cit., February 11, 1990.5.
Ballard, E.G. 1971. Philosophy at the Crossroads.
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Dennett, Daniel. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea:
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Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns
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Derrida, Of Grammatology, 21813.
For
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thing as a culture that writes but does not speak. The archaeological
record shows that humans were uniquely adapted for speech millennia
before there was any evidence of writing.14.
The
reference to “passional origin” has to do with
Chapter 2 of
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invention
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Derrida, Of Grammatology, 238.16.
Caputo, J. 1997. Deconstruction in a Nutshell. New
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Sokal says he submitted this afterword to Social Text,
only to have it rejected “on the grounds that it did not meet
their intellectual standards.”19.
Derrida, J. 1997. Le Monde, 20 November, 20.20.
Coman, Julian. 2004. “Derrida, Philosophy’s Father
of ‘Deconstruction’, Dies at 74,” The
Telegraph 10 October. Available online
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml21.
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29 April, D, 9.22.
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